There was the customary bustle of a market day at "Robinson's." Miss Franklin was moving about in the women's department, seeing that everybody there was served, and giving an occasional direction to the women who served. She was, as Dora Millar had once described her, as "fat as a pin-cushion," with what had been originally a fair pink-and-white complexion, degenerated into the mottled "red all over," into which such complexions occasionally pass in middle life. But she looked like a lady by many small traits--by her quiet, easy movements; by the clear enunciation and pleasant tones, which could be ringing when necessary, of a cultivated voice that reached the ears of the bystanders. She did not wear the conventional black silk or cashmere of a shop-woman. There might be a lingering protest or a lurking vanity in the myrtle-green gown and the little lace cap, with its tiny _noeuds_ of dark green riband, which she wore instead. One might guess by their dainty decorum and becomingness that Miss Franklin had thought a good deal, and to purpose, about dress, in her day--had made a study of it, and taken pleasure in its finer effects. In that light she was the right woman in the right place--presiding over the shop-women in a linen-draper's shop. At the same time she belonged as clearly to the upper middle class as did the two girls advancing towards the shop, who, in place of being studiously well and handsomely dressed, were just a little shabby, and careless how they looked in their last year's gray velveteens, with hats to match, which Dora in her conscientious economy had re-trimmed not very nicely.